ROY MASTERS knows of a way to God that leaves your emotions behind. The hypnotic tamborine-beating and arm-waving that we've all been accustomed to in church services touches the ego -- but our actual spirit is hidden by all the emotional distraction. Roy's "Observation Meditation" let's us see our corrupt inner selves while -- SIMULTANEOUSLY -- seeing the glory of God. It's probably the one true way God intended us to know Him: clear, unemotional, without excitement or fear. Unfortunately, something is missing: The will to STRUGGLE. The need to have the grit to fight against the abuses and absurdities of life.

So, although Roy Masters understands this exercise, it's hard for the listener to understand Roy. His delivery is very difficult to follow: He hesitates as he struggles for words and, as a result, listening gets tedious after a few minutes. This hesitancy of speech and lack of focus gives the meditation exercise a false, lackluster impression.

But it's worth the struggle. He's aware of the "lighthearted" (but serious) approach that's needed to understand God's word. "Religion has the words, but not the music," as he puts it. It's the difference between the "letter of the law" & "the spirit of the law." Observing God from our spirit, stripped of emotion and ego, brings the truth into focus. All these good things emanate from Roy's intended message -- unfortunately his mouth too often gets in the way of the message.

Listen to it at an arm's length. His infantile-sounding assessments of real-world matters -- politics, psychology, finances and health, for example -- need to be taken with a good-humored grain of salt. Wait it out and eventually he'll get to the good stuff.

However, that being said, adding the right kind of ambition makes life work. STRUGGLE: The enthusiastic struggle of a soul with its eye clearly focused on a victorious result. A "holy struggle". This attitude clears the cobwebs from the brain, puts the senses at maximum ability, and the body at maximum strength.

If you add the Observation/Meditation to this, you have a full balance that produces inner-peace and outer-strength.

Begin with the Roy Masters meditation. Get a hold of his tape & give it a listen. Beyond that, most of what he says is repetitive and just adds confusion to a good thing. Find your "holy struggle", mixing your meditative awareness with your innate ambition. Implement a daily, unemotional scan of the Bible to make it a total package that will actually work in real life: Both in your inner-being, and "out there" while fending off the world's assaults.

A Brief History: Roy Masters' father died of a heart attack when Roy was 15. He spent the early part of his life working with a stage hypnotist. In 1948, Roy left England for South Africa, where he worked in the diamond cutting trade -- and also satisfied his curiosity about mental processes by talking with witch doctors in the area. In 1949 Roy traveled on to United States and became a well known diamond expert and, at age 24, married his wife, Ann. After the Bridey Murphy case reinvigorated interest in reincarnation and hypnosis, Masters found himself surrounded with friends who wanted him to demonstrate his hypnotic abilities. Masters began conducting sessions, hypnotizing associates. The time constraint was too much on his day job, so he quit evaluating diamonds and founded the Institute of Hypnosis in Houston, Texas.

He soon realized that the hypnotic effect of life's pressures and stresses was the problem and that the reason he was so successful with his patients was that he was actually de-hypnotizing them. He finally started a radio show in Los Angeles in 1960, a 15-minute taped radio program on KTYM in Los Angeles, which later became a live call-in show. It was at this time that he started the Foundation of Human Understanding. He wrote How Your Mind Can Keep You Well in 1968, and by then a sizable following had developed. In the 1970s, the IRS at first refused to recognize the foundation as a religious organization. Masters filed a lawsuit that was settled in 1987, and the foundation was legally a church. By then, the foundation had moved to Grants Pass, Oregon. 40 years later Roy is still going strong with his nationally syndicated radio program "Advice Line" heard nightly on the Talk Radio Network. Today he resides with his wife Ann, in Grants Pass, Oregon where he continues to run the Foundation.

Beliefs: Masters believes that everyone is already hypnotized due to the stressful nature of their lives. Irrationality, irritability and anxiety are all traits found in hypnotized patients. Masters set about on his mission to teach the world psychocatalysis, a meditation technique. This technique taught people how to cure themselves of the ills plaguing them and foster an objective, yet spiritual outlook on life. Many who practiced the Masters' Observation/Meditation hovered around Masters and the Foundation, until he deliberately distanced himself from such "groupies", discouraging "Roy-bot ism", and concentrated exclusively on the radio broadcast and periodic seminars.

Size of His Following: Some reports say that 3 million people tune into Masters' radio show; supporting evidence from Neilson or Arbitron is unavailable.

Remarks: Masters' states that truth is latent within a person's soul: "Everything you 'learn' as a result of the meditation exercise is what you already know; the only thing new about it is the way it enters the mind and feelings from within rather than having been pressured to accept it." Masters' defines God as `stillness' and maintains that he is a Christian. He considers traditional preaching to be hypnotic, rendering church attendees emotionally open to pursuasion and thereby "feeling" that they're "saved", when they're actually only emotionally comfortable, secure in the authoritarian pose of the preacher.